A Surprising Feminist View From Hawkes

September 29, 1985|By Reviewed by William Veeder. A professor of English at the University of Chicago whose most recent book is ``Mary Shelley & Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny``.

Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade

By John Hawkes

Simon & Schuster, 364 pages, $17.95

``I am not my own woman!`` This cry of Sunny, the herione of John Hawkes` new novel, could have come from many of his previous women, but the cry this time has a force new in Hawkes` work. For more than three decades, Hawkes, in 10 books of fiction, has--despite lush incursions into the female consciousness--made the male psyche his central landscape. That a

reorientation was underway was signaled in his last novel, ``Virginie,`` when the narrators were, for the first time in Hawkes, women. Now, in ``Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade,`` the point-of-view woman has become the protagonist. And, more startling still, Hawkes in his 60th year has placed his heroine in a situation expressly feminist.

This perfect congruence of form and theme--viewpoint and protagonist becoming feminine as issues become feminist--seems particulary dramatic because Hawkes` fiction has made some women readers uncomfortable and even angry. These readers feel his aggressively psychoanalytic orientation and his fascination with pornography (``Virginie`` grew from ``a reverie about de Sade``) assure that a female character cannot be her own woman.

She is necessarily subordinate as an object of male aggression such as Jutta in ``The Cannibal`` (1949), Margaret in ``The Lime Twig`` (1961), and Chantal in ``Travesty`` (1976); as an emanation of the male psyche such as the anima figures Arian in ``Death, Sleep & the Traveler`` (1974) and Virginie; or as a projection of male anxiety such as the over-sexed castrator Miranda in

previous fiction is a question too intricate to be answered here. What is incontestable is the new orientation of ``Skin Trade.``

To explore what is involved in becoming one`s own woman, ``Skin Trade``

interweaves two narratives--Sunny`s childhood and her adulthood--and generates from each plot a basic question. Why did Sunny`s mother cry herself to sleep beside her husband, Jake? Why does Sunny as an adult dream about her dead father, Jake? Woman is thus defined by the night and male. Can she escape either? Both? She has a real chance because those features of Hawkes` earlier work that tended to subordinate woman have now become the subject of the novel and the object of criticism.

What were previously presented as a character`s limitations are now revealed as inadequacies in social stereotypes that must be destroyed before a woman can become her own person. Sunny`s mother, the aptly named Sissy, is Woman Subordinate, the girl Friday who burns with resentment beneath her timid supportive exterior but will never escape her mold. Sissy dies, unnoticed, of a heart attack during a game of hearts.

Jake is like the dominating males of previous Hawkes novels, but without the attractiveness we are supposed to respond to in Larry of ``The Lime Twig`` or Seigneur of ``Virginie.`` Jake is machismo laid bare. His East Coast elegance cannot hide his relentless dreams of heroic achievement, his repeated failure to realize these dreams, his reliance upon ``honor`` and repression in the face of failure and, inevitably, his need to deny woman`s passion, to encase her in chivalry.

Sunny has learned from her mother`s repression and has, by the opening of her own narration, taken over many traits that were once--in Western culture and in earlier Hawkes--exclusively male. She is sexually liberated, possesses skills as pilot, marksman and wilderness guide, and runs a thriving

(whorehouse) business. Why does she still dream of her father? Before Sunny can find an answer, her life is further complicated by the intrusion of a bona fide feminist.

Marty (nee Martha) Washington is even more thoroughly adrogynous than Sunny. Besides the ``male`` traits of vast erudition, fabulous prowess as hunter and massive sexual appetite, she is also a mother. ``You`re an innocent,` she said (to Sunny) finally. `I am a feminist. . . . An innocent,` she said steadily, `is a woman who doesn`t suffer. She has no commitments, no problems, Sex is easy. . . . You are ignorant of the rights of women. You earn your living by exploiting women. . . . A woman who has not borne a child,` she said in her detached humiliating way, `does not know anything about being a woman.` ``

``Skin Trade`` does not unilaterally endorse Marty`s somewhat smug, canned recitation of one version of feminism. Instead, Hawkes confronts Sunny with the issue of maternity that haunts many women in contemporary America. Sunny realizes she cannot decide whether to make some man a father until she escapes her desire for her own father. How she stops dreaming Jake, and whether she becomes her own woman, are questions that drive the climactic pages of ``Skin Trade.``

Literature is concerned, ultimately, not with themes, but with effects. Has Hawkes` ideological reorientation increased or at least sustained the power of his best novels? ``Skin Trade`` features less of what I admire most in Hawkes--the startling revelation of depths, the extraordinary image. But his two prior, ``pornographic`` novels, ``The Passion Artist`` and

``Virginie,`` also seemed a falling off. Whether feminism has energized or enervated Hawkes, whether theme bears any direct relation to effect in his creative process, I am not sure.

What I do believe is that ``Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade`` towers over most contemporary fiction, as Hawkes` work has for nearly 40 years. John Hawkes has been kept secret in American fiction since World War II, and it is perhaps too much to hope that he will ever find the large popularity that he deserves. Maybe ``Skin Trade`` will surprise us all.